Online Lectures – Unfinished Business: The Mystery of Margate and Turner’s Bequest

About this event

This lecture series will give the opportunity to dive deeper into the story of Turner's bequest, his legacy today, and the relation with Margate.

This lecture series will give the opportunity to dive deeper into the story of Turner’s bequest, his legacy today, and the relation with Margate.

All lectures will be online and recorded. The recording will be shared with ticket holders for a limited time period.

14th May– Contest and controversy: the distribution of Turner’s bequest to the nation – Alan Crookham, Curator of Unfinished Business: The Mystery of Margate and Turner’s Bequest
6.30 – 7.30pm
The lecture will consider the history of the Turner Bequest at the National Gallery in London. It will start by looking at Turner’s will, how it was contested by his relatives before the Court of Chancery, and the resolution of the court case. The talk will then turn to the history of the display of the Turners at Trafalgar Square and the complicated relationship between the National and Tate Galleries as they sought to determine the final, and at times controversial, distribution of the bequest.

11th June – Encounters at MoMA: Turner, Rothko and the Invention of a ‘Modernist’ – Nicole Cochrane
6.30-7.30pm
In March 1966, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened Turner: Imagination and Reality a groundbreaking exhibition featuring an unprecedented number of works by J. M. W. Turner from Tate, alongside major US loans. Conceived by art historian Lawrence Gowing, it was the first MoMA exhibition to showcase a historic artist. The display positioned Turner not as a figure of the past but as a forerunner of modernism – an idea memorably echoed when Mark Rothko, viewing the show with Tate Director Norman Reid, remarked, “That man Turner, he learnt a lot from me.”
This lecture will explore how the 1966 exhibition reshaped public and scholarly understanding of Turner, particularly his late unfinished works, and considers why he has since been framed as a precursor to modernism. It also highlights how these narratives continue to influence contemporary museum displays at Tate and beyond.

13th August – Franny Moyle, Turner and Margate
6.30-7.30pm

In a beautifully illustrated talk, Turner biographer and art historian Franny Moyle will explore J M W Turner’s life-long relationship with the seaside town of Margate. From his earliest known childhood drawings, to his late works, Margate provided a constant source of inspiration for the artist. It was also a place associated with love: first a failed engagement in his youth, and then the fulfilling relationship with Sophia Booth, who was with Turner in the last years of his life.